Hi team,
Eager to hear from people who’ve taken the eCommerce Forecasting course and how they’ve modeled their non-ad spend amounts into the forecast. I ask as email and affiliates are two core expenses AFTER my ad spend. The course doubles down on the ad spends cost but what about other channel costs?
Eager for anybody’s thoughts on this as I am a little stuck on how to process this.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T08:48:02Z
@nickpape welcome to the community.
@carlp @sakib perhaps you can connect nick with others here who have taken this course?
Hey @belalismail and @jobsforkarthikan I hope it’s alright to tag you here! I noticed you completed the eCommerce Forecasting course. Any advice for @nickpape here?
Were also reaching out to the instructor see if we can get you some first hand help 
@nickpape Here’s the response from the instructor -
"You can treat any marketing expense in two ways.
It’s a variable cost with the revenue and it’s treated the same as ad spend. They can relabel the column to marketing spend if that helps. But, affiliate can go in the ad spend column and still be treated with aMER as the goal. It’s still producing new customers at a certain aMER and then those customers come back and repeat.
Email spend, unless it’s paying for sponsorships in newsletters or something like that is more of a fixed cost. If I’m paying Klaviyo $2k/mo, that isn’t necessarily exclusively for acquiring new customers. It’s better treated as an operating expense. I would simply include that cost in your operating expenses rather than trying to account for it as ad spend."
This is a great help! I was toying with these expenses as to whether there to be operating or variable expenses. And, if the latter, would they be solely attributed to driving new customers or not?
This really helps so thanks for the speedy reply!
If they’re fully variable expenses, I would count them either in CAC or in Gross Margin depending on what they are.